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Introduction

Anthropology, the study of humans, has two basic divisions. Physical anthropology studies human evolution and human biological variation, while cultural anthropology considers the social aspects of human life, such as language, behavior, and beliefs. Both fields have sought to establish classifications of human beings in order to further the understanding of them. Physical anthropologists once relied heavily on racial classifications, but the concept of race is no longer recognized as scientifically valid. “Race” is now considered a cultural construct. Physical anthropologists today rely instead on the principles of genetics to study differences and similarities between humans. Cultural anthropologists may categorize people into groupings based on ethnicity.

Race

Introduced into the English language long before its current meaning was commonly agreed on, the word race initially meant simply a group of people having something in common. This shared identity could be species-wide (“the human race”) or could be based on a number of characteristics such as national interest (“the French race”), way of life (“a race of women warriors”), or religion (“the Jewish race”).

As Europeans began to explore and colonize the world and to come into contact with a great many peoples with vastly different cultures, notions of a hierarchy of human types—designed to uphold the superiority of the conquerors—became popular. The advancement of the sciences—the measurement of body parts, the “objective” quantification of intelligence—lent a seeming legitimacy to these convenient social attitudes.

Over time, these factors solidified into a “racial worldview,” a systematic, institutionalized set of beliefs and attitudes that viewed humankind as divided into permanently distinct and unequal populations that could be ranked in a hierarchy. Each race supposedly possessed a number of different behavioral and physical traits, such as skin color, head shape, and hair texture, that were transmitted from parents to offspring and that were sufficient to characterize the race as a distinguishable human type (for example, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid).

During the 18th century, the racial worldview accorded dark skin and African or Native American ancestry inferior status in North America. Institutionalized in both practice and law, it was enforced through a variety of social mechanisms.

Race ideology spread around the colonial world, but with varying expressions. In India, for instance, British colonizers introduced the idea of race after the conquests of the 18th century. In the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries, they attempted to classify the “races” of India but failed to adequately account for the wide range of biophysical traits that spans the subcontinent. In Japan and China Westerners introduced the notion of a “yellow race.” Yellow is considered an auspicious color in China, and some Chinese retooled the racial ideology to fit their own ethnic stereotypes.

Among the major writings that bolstered the racial worldview was a four-volume work by Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau, entitled Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–55). This work had a profound effect upon European social theory and attitudes toward human differences. Gobineau used a model that divided the human population into three races, “white,” “black,” and “yellow.” He asserted the superiority of the white race over the others and claimed that the Germanic peoples, whom he called the “Aryans,” represented the summit of civilization and the “purest” of all peoples. This later became the root concept of Nazi race theories promoted by the 20th-century German leader Adolf Hitler. These theories were implemented in the Holocaust, Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews. In the late 19th century, English naturalist Francis Galton coined the term eugenics, introducing the philosophy of “improving” the “superior” races by selective breeding.

By the end of the 19th century, notions of race had become so ingrained that many scholars believed them to be universal. Today the term has little scientific standing. Older methods of differentiation, including hair form and body measurement, have given way to the comparative analysis of DNA and gene frequencies relating to such factors as blood typing, the excretion of amino acids, and inherited enzyme deficiencies.

Biological distinctions between humans deal with relatively minor differences. All people belong to a single species (Homo sapiens), and within that species, all human populations today are extremely similar genetically. In the late 20th century, genetic studies confirmed that “races” do not exist in any biological sense: there is no genetic indicator that can be used to divide populations into separate races.

Most researchers have abandoned the concept of race for the concept of the cline, a graded series of differences occurring along a line of environmental or geographical transition. This reflects the recognition that human populations have always been in a state of flux. Genes have constantly flowed from one gene pool to another, impeded only by physical or ecological boundaries. While relative isolation does preserve genetic differences and allow populations to maximally adapt to climatic and disease factors over long periods of time, all groups currently existing are thoroughly “mixed” genetically. The differences that still exist do not lend themselves to simple typologizing. “Race” is today primarily a sociological designation, identifying a class sharing some outward physical characteristics and some commonalities of culture and history.

Ethnicity

The word ethnicity is derived from ethnos, a Greek word meaning “nation.” The Greek word as originally used referred to tribal groups. An ethnic group is a social group or category of the population that, in a larger society, is set apart and bound together by common ties, including language, nationality, culture, perceived “racial” characteristics, and a shared history. There are often territorial ties as well, though many ethnic groups have been driven out of their homelands or have dispersed to pursue greater opportunities elsewhere. Ethnic diversity is one aspect of the social complexity found in most contemporary societies, the legacy of political conquests and migrations.

Ethnicity has long been a cause of rivalry, hostility, and discrimination. The nation-state, which strives for political unity, has traditionally been uneasy with ethnic diversity. Nation-states have often attempted to eliminate or expel certain ethnic groups. Notable examples include the Nazi policy against Jews during World War II, the expulsion of Moors and Jews from 15th-century Spain, and the expulsion of Arabs and East Indians from several newly independent African countries in the 1960s and ’70s.

Many nations today practice some form of pluralism, which usually rests on a combination of toleration, interdependence, and separatism. In Switzerland, for instance, the three major ethnic groups are concentrated in separate cantons, or districts, each enjoying a large measure of local control within a democratic federation.

Assimilation is a process whereby individuals or groups of differing ethnicity are absorbed into the dominant culture of a society—though not always completely. Assimilation may be forced, induced, or voluntary. Forced assimilation, for example, was imposed in early modern times by the English, who were themselves a mixture of Saxon and Norman elements. The English conquerors suppressed the native language and religion in the Celtic lands of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Through considerably less brutal methods, the Chinese ethnic groups in Thailand and Indonesia have been legally induced to adopt the dominant culture through a process called “directed acculturation.”

In the United States, millions of European immigrants became more or less voluntarily assimilated within two or three generations. This “Americanization” was due in part to the upheaval of overseas relocation, the influences of the public-school system, and other forces in American life.

Amalgamation (or hybridization) occurs when a society becomes ethnically mixed in a way that represents a synthesis rather than the elimination or absorption of one group by another. In Mexico, for example, Spanish and Indian cultures have become increasingly amalgamated over centuries of contact.

In some countries competing groups have difficulty arriving at a working arrangement, so strife and separatism are common. When the country of Yugoslavia was formed after World War I without regard to existing ethnic boundaries, for example, many ethnic groups were suddenly forced to live together in one nation. Hostilities between the various groups boiled over into outright war after the communist system that had held the country together collapsed in the early 1990s, and Yugoslavia splintered into several different countries.

Racism

A product of the belief that humans are divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races” is racism, an ideology based on the notion that some races are innately superior to others. According to the racial worldview, there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural behavioral features.

Racism was at the heart of North American slavery and the colonization and empire-building activities of some western Europeans overseas, especially in the 18th century. The idea of race was constructed to magnify the differences between people of European origin in the United States and those of African descent whose ancestors had been brought against their will to function as slaves in the American South. By projecting Africans and their descendants as lesser human beings, the proponents of slavery attempted to justify and maintain this system of exploitation. The contradiction between slavery and the ideology of human equality, accompanied by a philosophy of human freedom and dignity, seemed to demand the dehumanization of those enslaved. By the 19th century, racism had matured and the idea spread around the world.

The expression of racism has taken many different forms. The legal segregation, or separation, of different races, for example, was a feature of racism in North America and in South Africa under apartheid. Laws required different races to have their own public facilities, such as water fountains and bathrooms, and institutions, such as schools, churches, and hospitals. In South Africa different races were also required to live in separate areas, and a great many people were forcibly relocated. Most social contacts between members of different races, such as interracial marriages, were banned.

Those who practice racism often hold that only low-status jobs should go to people of races deemed low-status. They also often believe that members of the economically and culturally dominant race alone should have access to privileges, political power, economic resources, educational opportunities, and unrestricted civil rights. The lived experience of racism for members of “low-status” races can include daily insults and frequent acts and verbal expressions of contempt and disrespect, all of which have profound effects on social relationships.

Conflicts stemming from racism and ethnocentrism remain a serious problem. Lingering racial divisions in post-apartheid South Africa, social inequality and unrest in the United States and other parts of the world, resentment in Great Britain directed against immigrants from former colonies, and reluctance on the part of many nations in many areas to accept Southeast Asian refugees are just a few examples of the results of conflicts between racial and ethnic groups.

Racism differs from ethnocentrism in that it is linked to supposedly physical and therefore immutable differences among people. Ethnic identity is acquired, and ethnic features are learned forms of behavior. Race, on the other hand, is a form of identity that is perceived as innate and unalterable.

In the last half of the 20th century, many conflicts around the world were interpreted in racial terms even though their origins were in the ethnic hostilities that have long characterized many human societies—between, for example, Arabs and Jews or English and Irish. Racism reflects an acceptance of the deepest forms and degrees of divisiveness and carries the implication that differences between groups are so great that they cannot be transcended. (See alsominority groups; social class.)

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